Building a Real-Time Notification System Using Server-Sent Events (SSE) in Go and Gin

Real-time notifications are essential for any modern web application. Whether you’re building a chat system, monitoring dashboard, or live update feature, Server-Sent Events (SSE) provides an efficient way for the server to push data to the client over HTTP.

In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to build a real-time notification system using SSE in Go with the Gin web framework. We’ll also show you how to set up a reproducible Go development environment using Nix, which ensures your dependencies are consistent across different systems.

Prerequisites

1. Nix package manager installed on your machine (follow this guide if you haven’t installed it yet).
2. Gin framework and Go development environment (we’ll set this up below).

Setting Up a Reproducible Development Environment with Nix

To ensure a consistent environment for developing and running your Go application, use Nix to provide the necessary dependencies.

Run the following command to enter a Nix shell with the latest version of go from the nixos-unstable channel:

nix-shell -I nixpkgs=https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/nixos-unstable.tar.gz -p go -v

This command does the following:

• -I nixpkgs=...: Specifies the URL of the Nix package repository…